Rigged at Last!

I FINALLY finished rigging them both, and while I did so, I discovered that the feathers work better with the joints when they are separately "rigid binded" to the arm joints in groups based on  location while the main "arm" parts are smooth-binded and then edited with skin weight painting to work perfectly. Texturing is taken care of with this strategy as well.

Prometheus Textured1

As you can see, with my new setup of the feathers separated from the body, it allows me to further texture with accuracy--opposed to Sonora, who was kind of fail. Also, I made the talons a separate texture, as well as the claws. So now the birdy looks more sophisticated and moves adequately. :) YAY!

Skin Weighting

As you can see, I've been working on the bird a bit more. This is a screen shot of my skin painting efforts after re-compositing Prometheus to work with the rigs.I'm going through and painting the feathers individually (rows, that is) so that the joints can apply to those feathers separately from the arm "flesh" and the other feather rows. This will allow me to have a more precise control over the wings when I animate them while also allowing me to texture the rows of feathers separately. It might be a bit more of a pain, but I think it's worth it, considering the quality that will result.

Texturing Brick Wall

I started texturing Sonora today to see if I needed to do anything before I continued, and I found that I need the primary feathers in the wings to be separate from the others before I can texture her correctly. Unfortunately, I've already combined the feathers with the main structure, so that is impossible with her model. However, Prometheus' beak is corrected and all of his feathers are still separate, so I'll use the same rigging for him as with Sonora, tweak it and make it larger, then set him up to be textured properly and duplicate him then to re-make Sonora. WHEW! Long process. Here I go.

Prometheus Storyboard

Flight Test After Rigging

So I'm not finished rigging everything yet, but I've started painting on skin weights for the wings (which were DEFINITELY needed) and this is one of the poses I checked with the skin weights because it's one of the main ones I'll be using throughout the animation. It's not too bad, but the wings look a little bonier than I'd like, so I'll be working with skin weights again.

Beak Editing

In this picture, I've shown the new setup of Sonora's beak. Why? I had to bind the skin to the skeleton I created and it wasn't pretty the way it was. Smooth skinning with skin weight painting didn't work, simply extracting the beak and attaching it to the beak joints with rigid bind wasn't much better, and the last option I had was to rescale the beak and edit the sculpture of it. Now, I'm going to have to duplicate this beak later when I'm working on rigging Prometheus, but for now I'm just making sure Sonora works in her smaller setup.

Path Animation Video

Path Animation

I did a tutorial today with a path animation, which I found I preferred to the normal animation. It allowed for smoother transitions and even turns, but I'm afraid that with some of my animations I won't be able to use this feature. However, I think this will work with my birds, since they have to go around and over and through things in the clock.

Male vs Female Models

On the left, the male (Prometheus), and on the right, the female (Sonora). I duplicated Prometheus and scaled him down to make Sonora, then to further distinguish her from him, I made her slimmer and shortened her tail feathers. She'll be yellow and a light brownish color, while he'll be a two-tone blue. I'm thinking of having their primaries be the secondary color as well as two feathers in their tail, and then making the body and other feathers be the primary color. The beaks will (hopefully) be orangey (orangy?) and I'll keep both eyes black. I'll have to make eyelids... Bah. I'll work on that next.

Epic Modeling Win

Bam. Bird. Done. Now I'll be moving on to rigging and texturing, possibly lighting and making a duplicate of it for the female version I'll also be using in the storyline. I'll only tweak a few things in the female version (I might start calling it the beta version or Sonora, since that's the bird's name, so bear with me) because I want it to resemble the male enough to be the same species but not the exact replica. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the short will be called "Prometheus," named after the male. I'll post the storyboard up here soon.

Coverts Setup

I finished the coverts for the left wing and I am now trying to figure out how to mirror them across to the other wing with the proper angles and all. I'll start on that tomorrow.

Tail Setup

I decided to go with the five-feather fan, which is, in my opinion, more appealing to the eye and allows me to still have a relatively even cover without going insane over rigging in the future.

Primaries Setup

Songbird Primaries Setup

From now on, I'll be calling my canary a "songbird" since the storyline's been changed so that the main bird is actually blue. While it is true that I have a yellow bird in the storyline still, canaries aren't blue, so I'll just be calling them songbirds.
Anyways, I've set up the primaries for the wings (24 total, which will be murder to rig) and now I'll be starting on the secondaries. I slimmed the base wings down, since I don't want the wings to be too huge, and before I move on in the wings, I'm going to re-align the wing fan, which should be interesting, since I might have to delete a feather in favor of a five-feather tail setup.

Canary Tail Re-Do Image

Canary Tail Re-Do

I started work again on my canary, having done a sufficient amount of work on my model of Big Ben. Since I wasn't satisfied with the tail on my canary, I went into polygon proxy mode and deleted that portion of the model, leaving me with a hole. I then modeled basic feather shapes in Maya and imported them into the canary file, making tail feathers which can also be re-sized for my wing flight feathers later. With the tail being individual feathers, I can have them fan out later in animation and shrink together with individual skeletons attatched to the main spine. This will allow for more realistic imaging and easier texturing later on.

Big Ben Progress Photo

Big Ben Progress

I've switched over now to working on my lovely London clock. Why? I got fed up with the canary. Instead of deleting the canary or messing it up in my fury, I decided to go with a nice geometrical modeling of Big Ben, which has been quite relaxing--other than the occasional Maya glitch which suddenly deletes my file... Anyways, I have the basic shape sculpted, and now I will be working on seeing if textures will help me with the finer details.

Personal Project Canary Talons

Personal Project Advances

Right now, I'm working on my personal project for this class, in which I will be modeling Big Ben (the clock) and a canary. So, recently I've started on the canary which is progressing at a relatively fast rate, considering that I only just learned to model in subdivision surfaces. So far I've modeled the basic shape of the canary (wings, legs, head, body, tail) and have started on details for the feet and beak. The feet turned out well since I had sculpted a similar foot earlier (see below post) and the beak was surprisingly easy once I found the knack for it.

Rigging the Claw

Subdivision Followup Result

Subdivision Project Followup

Since I wasn't satisfied with the result of my previous subdivision modeling practice, I decided to go off of the hand tutorial with Maya help and make something that would relate to my personal project that involves a bird--a canary, to be more specific. Let's just say that I am EXTREMELY pleased with this round. See for yourself.